The Aggressive Greed of Decadent Imperialist Capitalism in the COVID-19 Era

The U.S. continues to be the command center for Western imperial capitalism, shaken by multiple crises and systemic decline, accelerated and deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic and effectively leveraged by its elite corporations for them to earn more money and accumulate more resources and power. This deepens social polarization, the impoverishment of its people, the oppression of women, social inequalities and an incalculable and dangerous environmental degradation.

The current pandemic has served to pull back the curtain even further on how the capitalist elites and their political leadership manipulate crises to further enrich themselves, fueling the evils that accompany the progressive decomposition of a civilization made in its image and its likeness.

For the great capitalist powers, especially in the United States, the internal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has also meant an acceleration of economic depression at the national and global levels, exacerbating the divisions among the leading group of governor-dominators and intensifying the processes of gangsterization between its two primary factions, the globalists and the neofascists, while it strips away at their false democracies to reveal the dramatic injustices and aberrations within the system in the process.

In the COVID-19 era, this reality is at its most lucid when related to the serious problems in health, education, food, work, sexist violence and the environmental crisis. Meanwhile, the sharp differences between the two modes of domination become increasingly irreconcilable, as do their respective strategies in the face of the new challenges posed by the growing insubordination of the vast social fabric that resists them.

Globalists in Charge

As things stand, the magnates of the gigantic pharmaceutics, technology, military industry, mining, robotics, medicine, social control and security, aerospace, communication and global corporate banking firms work tirelessly to profit as much as possible from the crisis in order to continue their domination.

The Rothschilds, Pfizer, Merck, Abbott, AstraZeneca, Moderna … Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, the Rockefellers, Elon Musk, JP Morgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and BNY Mellon…. Even with their great capitalist concerns and anxieties, none can hide their beaming smiles of satisfaction at the big pile of money they've got.

The manipulation of the health crisis on their watch and the economic depression that they accelerated has without a doubt allowed them to multiply their fortunes and increase their global control. They have earned these fabulous sums in a variety of ways:

By making and selling expensive medicines with the help of the World Health Organization and states that are subordinated to neoliberal recolonization.

Through the vaccines, accompanied by the speculative and discriminatory processes triggered by the beginning of their sale and distribution.

Through the mass increase in intensive care units: ventilators, sophisticated medical equipment, masks, syringes and tests.

Through the manipulation of “lockdowns,” “quarantines,” “stay at home” orders and everything associated with remote learning and work, e-commerce, electronic surveillance, militarization, virtual meeting software, new connectivity technologies and huge numbers of orders and sales made through computers, tablets and smartphones.

With the vaccines, they have generated tremendous demand in the midst of vaccine stockpiling by the most powerful states and through the oligarchic control of supply, which allows them to engage in truly shameful levels of extortion and profiteering. In this way, the imperial centers deprive the rest of the world of the chance to vaccinate themselves at the pace that the rich nations can.

Yet, that is not all.

They have also amassed their fortunes through the abusive pricing of food and the overexploitation of the planet’s most oppressed.

Through the continuous overwork of women, reinforced by the patriarchal, unremunerated confinement that they are subjected to during the COVID era.

Through the brutal increase in strategic mineral extraction that sustains the proliferation and continuous replacement of cutting-edge technologies and an increase in the demand for the key commodities of the fourth industrial revolution.

All this generates more concentrated wealth at the expense of a concomitant impoverishment that is as brutal as it is widespread.

Big Capital’s Big Headaches

Yet it is not all sunshine and rainbows on both sides in the midst of the destructive impact of this method of managing a multi-mega crisis of this scale and breadth. In fact, it causes a series of headaches for big capital.

The blue corner, the globalist “mega-capitalists,” and the red, the neofascist capitalist monstrosity that confronts it at the heart of the system, are growingly threatened by inevitable mass social and politico-social rebellions, as well as by a marked tendency not just for mass outbreaks but also for a slow, yet progressive and authentic, global insurgency.

Additionally, both factions are threatened by the confrontation between the two opposing political parties, themselves positioned between two headaches that do not usually subside of their own accord.

The globalists earn more money, while the neofascists grow in number in the United States and in many regions of the world, turn more and more violent and promote violent reactions of an ultranationalist character infused with high concentrations of populism.

The most relevant demonstration of this complex reality is what has just happened in the U.S. with the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, both before and after it was acted out. The Democrats, acting under a strong globalist influence, were unable to convict Trump in the political trial that took place in Congress after the violent assault on the Capitol.

That fact, for all the verbal gymnastics that they want to employ, strengthens “Trumpism,” both inside and outside the Republican Party. The truth is that fascism cannot be defeated with discourse alone, nor with initiatives made through poisoned institutions.

Trumpism is the gringo strain of American fascism; it maintains a significant institutional presence and a strong extra-institutional force composed of the masses, corporations, the paramilitary and military, the church and the cultural ideology.

Some say that the Democratic Party knew that it was not going to reach the votes required, but that it nonetheless opted to initiate this trial in an attempt to divide the Republican Party before the election in 2024.

Up to now, there is little Republican opposition to Trump’s role. The majority of Republicans are sitting comfortably in the shade of a neofascist project given the weight of conservative tendencies, racism, xenophobia and homophobia in its ranks and in its electorate. However, Trump, as a neo-Nazi monstrosity emerging from the U.S. lumpenproletariat, has also managed to gain a significant influence outside the Republicans’ political borders, most notably among the ranks of white supremacists.

The trajectory of recent events indicates that the confrontation described above will have to be resolved outside what is strictly institutional, just as it may occur with the political-social anti-systemic coalition that is gestating in the heart of U.S. society, with a noticeable impact in the Democratic Party’s spheres of influence, a rebellion that continues to be stifled by the party establishment and by the corporate elite that finances it.

I think that with all the recent happenings after the assault on the Capitol, Trump must be nearly euphoric; it is just that his fascistic cackling, ringing out within the walls and the grounds of his vast mansion in Florida, cannot be heard in either Washington or in New York.